


The Final Sacrifice

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: The Shrine / An Argument - Fleet Foxes (Music Video)
Genre: Animal Death, Animal Transformation, Blood and Gore, Dragons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 05:12:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14585703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: Under this aegis his hooves clopped loud, too loud, over the dust-caked stones on which the ancients had walked to venerate the gods whose favor he now sought.





	The Final Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minutia_R](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/gifts).



The blasted landscape was the color of fire: blackened branches and ember-red rock dust. A sky the color of the sun-bleached grass in the autumn plains was rent at intervals by jagged mountain peaks, some barren, some hiding ruins of dwellings and bridges built long ago by those people who had worshiped the dragon-gods of the mountains. Those people who had fallen long before their masked descendants—or usurpers—arrived to wander from ruin to ruin, revering the ancient gods in their own strange and bloody rituals.

Beneath it all stepped the spirit-man. On cloven hooves he passed through the ranks of his dead, elders and hunters and the empty eyes of the hind, still bearing the spots of youth around his eyes, that had once been his son. Even in death those eyes seemed to regard the world with a child’s curiosity, the fire-blasted landscape reflected in their dulling gaze like the sky in a pool. Though the masked mountain people were long gone, their sacrifices remained, a grim tribute to the gods whose crags and crevasses they still walked.

Only the spirit man had avoided the slaughter, urging his hind-son away from their drums and fires and strange masks only to watch him fall to a hunter’s blade forged from sky-iron too mercifully sharp, at least, for his son to have felt before his death. Only the spirit man, who had once worn a hind skin to take on the keen ears and clever nose of the hind to guide his people to water, to buried roots, to true hinds that could be culled for skins and dark, rich meat. Alone of his tribe could he understand what had happened to them with a human’s canniness as his transformed people wandered and rutted and died like the animals they had become at their enemies’ hands, their stick-mounted heads offered to those enemies’ gods in thanks forming a grim thicket before him.

 _If we follow the hinds into the mountains, to the ruins,_ the spirit-man had warned his tribe, _we will leave ourselves open to the masked ones, to say nothing of the gods themselves._

 _But the hinds are all traveling that way,_ argued the hunters. _If they’ve exhausted the food here on the plains there will be none for us left either. Certainly come the summer._

 _We can dig for insects and roots until the rains come,_ the spirit-man insisted. _At least until the hinds return._

 _We will follow the hinds,_ the elders had finally said.

The hunters had led the march, the old and the children bearing tents and pots and dried hind meat as they marched under a harsh, waxing sun toward the ruins. At first, in the rocky foothills, they had endured. Camping in scrubland and beneath outlying crumbled towers they had hunted birds and occasional hinds that wandered near, searching for the odd tender bud or hardy mountain root not yet stripped from the ground either by the spirit-man’s people or by those who had presumably passed that way before.

When the moon was full the mask-wearers had returned.

With mercy as cruel as a sky-iron blade, whatever ritual the masked ones had performed to transform the spirit-man’s people had seemingly taken from them the memories of what they had once been. They hunted each other, wandered mindlessly toward the smell of food, ignored the spirit-man’s desperate attempts to herd or lure them away from further danger. One by one they were hunted down by the wolves of the plains, lamed by stones, and, finally, slaughtered by the mask-wearers to appease the ancient gods of the ruins who had given them this power over their encroaching enemies.

The masked ones’ spirit-woman who had transformed his tribe had been alone, masked as a rabbit to seek out other rabbits, or the enemies of rabbits, when the spirit-man came upon her. It had not been difficult—those who trafficked with spirits spent a great deal of time alone, within shouting distance of camp but rarely fearing anything aside from packs of wolves in the winter or the occasional hunting cat. Not expecting ferocity from a hind, assuming all the transformed tribe were dead, her body's stance had only belatedly changed from curiosity to shock as he had kicked her squarely in the throat before pushing her off a high ledge over the ruins where he now stood. No one had ventured to look for her, rightly fearing the dragon-gods without a spirit-man or -woman to guide them, even with the sacrifices they had made.

And yet, one sacrifice remained. The most dangerous of prey—that with nothing left to lose.

The spirit-man had anointed his grey-brown muzzle with the blood of a ground squirrel, killed without his knife, with the blunt, useless teeth of a grass-eater. Under this aegis his hooves clopped loud, too loud, over the dust-caked stones on which the ancients had walked to venerate the gods whose favor he now sought. Before him stood a low spawning pool in which things too long and sinuous to be fish flickered just below the stagnant, ochre surface.

The water tasted like slime, like lukewarm blood.

_Those who slaughtered my people, they did not kill us all._

_I remain._

_Take my sacrifice, lend me its power._

His legs felt strangely light as he returned to the ruin in which he had slept since the slaughter of his people, smelling no wolves or mask-wearers within. Those wolves had already begun to flicker in the cave's darkness, the flame-colored world outside distorting into strange patterns just beyond understanding. There was power here, power the mask-wearers knew nothing of even with their sacrifices to the ancient gods that no one understood anymore. In the sky darkening above, in the sacred owls and clinging branches and wolves that howled close behind in the darkness. In the fire burning, a fire to sleep beside in the mountain cold, surrounded by masked figures who danced and flickered like flames themselves. Wolves rose from the fire, chasing, tearing at hide and bone, watched by a single eye like an eddy in a stream, pulling and urging along

too long, too long

a snake like death, like a moving, felled tree, its tongue reaching to

sting

fallingfallingfallingfallingfalling

Inward and onward into the eye of the hind, who cried and kicked as the ancient gods’ power flared before it: dragons joined upon dragons, the forests of blinding whiteness of alkali plans and the glint of sunlight on water, water stumbling and falling, not stopping, sliding into cold and stillness, then movement. Water.

Sinking.

Thrashing.

Dying.

Not dead.

His lungs were empty now, and the spirit-man was shocked back to reality, too stunned from the spawning pool water and the venom of whatever thing had come to him to gasp in the poison salt tide he had been suspended in. _The inland sea._ Here there were no fish, no eels, none of the things from the spawning pool, nothing but still, murky water and the silt roiling below him. The spirit-man glanced down in dread, fighting his breath every inch of the way.

From murky silt, four glowing orbs rose. Two dragons. Not two dragons. One: two joined together, patterned like the snakes that might be crushed underfoot in a land that made sense. Two mouths, four jaws, rose toward him, one grasping the oily mane at the back of his neck, one a haunch scarred like his own thigh. Pain ripped through him, like drowning, like fire, like the slice of a sky-iron blade. He could _feel_ his own flesh parting, the sea around him roiling with it as the spirit man ripped all of himself that remained from the dying mind of the hind. He was dying, he was not dying, he would be torn in two like the world around him that had made sense before the draught of the spawning-pool.

_Those who slaughtered my people, they did not kill us all._

_I remain._

_Take my sacrifice, lend me its power._

Within his blood, flickers of the dragon venom still burned. _Look past the pain,_ it seemed to say. Use it. _Remove yourself from it, from the creature suffering it. You are a spirit-man of the plains, dying, not dying, pulling yourself from it like yourself from the hides you once wore. You have nothing left to lose but this life, everything to gain from the sacrifice you have offered._

Reaching out...

A hand closed around the inner wall of one torn flank. Blinded by billowing clouds of blood that dimmed the water still further, the spirit-man tore at the curtains of rent flesh until he wrenched himself from the carcass that he had once been, sun-colored limbs and scarred legs and long-grown beard in a tangle like the legs of a newborn hind.

It was enough.

Pushing aside viscera and blood-infused water alike, leaving the dragon-gods to their feast, the spirit-man summoned the last of the life imparted to him and kicked for the water’s surface.


End file.
